Palm’s Rich Dellinger, a man who has been credited with the Palm Pre’s and webOS’s beautiful unobtrusive notification system, has left Palm in the midst of the company being acquired by HP. Dellinger is headed for Apple according to his LinkedIn page and his position at Apple gives iPhone users new hope that some of his work with webOS’s notification system can be continued, improved, and merged with the iOS platform to deliver to iPhone users a method for unobtrusive notifications.

The current method for notifications on the iPhone is obtrusive–a popup appears in the middle of the screen and you cannot continue your current task unless you dismiss the notification or address it. Additionally, if there are multiple simultaneous or consecutive notifications arriving in a short period of time, only the most recent notification gets the popup and the older ones would not alert the user, unless the user happens to check the “badge”–or number–next to the app indicating how many notifications that app has that has yet to be addressed.